Word: crimeeds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Presumably the oh-so-self-effacing Koch does not pretend to philosophical consistency. In Koch's rhetoric on crime it is difficult to find any inner moral conviction to support his demand for vengeance...
WITH THE POSSIBLE exception of Attorney General Edwin Meese III, New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch more than any other American politician has openly advocated tougher penalties for violent crime. On this issue, Democrat Koch falls for the unconvincing Neo-Con attacks on the criminal justice system...
...THIS CONTEXT, it is difficult to respect the purported intellectual content of Koch's writings on crime. Koch wrote for The New Republic and more recently contributed to Policy Review a slavishly favorable review of Harvard professors James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein's Crime and Human Nature...
Though no one can prove that the death penalty will actually reduce crime, Koch asserts that the death penalty "must be available to punish crimes of cold-blooded murder, cases in which any other form of punishment would be inadequate and, therefore, unjust." In effect, Koch excludes as "unjust" any policy which might achieve the same decrease in crime without putting offenders to death. It is a crime that a Democrat could justify a state which can sacrifice the lives of its citizens as the means...
...REVIEW OF Crime and Human Nature, "The Mugger and His Genes," reduces the arguments of the book to a heavy-handed call for harsher criminal penalties. But by ascribing to their book an unintended ideological content, he distorts the attempts of Wilson and Herrnstein to provide an objective criminology. Their theory sees criminal actions as results of rational judgment, and, most controversially, argues that factors such as low intelligence, sex, body structure, the reaction-time of one's autonomic nervous system, and inheritable psychotic or aggressive tendencies tend to correlate with criminality...